Monthly Archives: January 2012

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8BIT has placed their photography theme, Pro Photo Theme, up for public auction on Flippa. The buy it now price is $35,000 and the bidding starts at $10,000. The auction will close in just under seven days. According to 8BIT’s John Saddington, the team has decided to sell Pro Photo to provide more bandwidth for themselves to support “big changes coming [their] way”.

In the listing the team disclosed their revenue to date, which is likely interesting to anyone who has dabbled in selling WordPress themes before. The theme launched in May and since then has brought in $11,000 in gross sales with a net profit at $8,600. The team estimates that the theme could gross over $20,000 per year. A number of other stats are available, along with more questions and answers about the theme itself, on Flippa.

Normally on this blog we talk about buying themes from an end user’s perspective, and not as a business looking to resell it. What do you think of 8BIT’s auction here, and do you think they’ll see any bites before the auction is up?

This time of year always turns up a few community surveys as organizations begin to look to the future and plan out the next twelve months. Included on the list of surveys to take this time around is this WP e-Commerce survey. It turns out the team at Instinct Entertainment are looking to past and present users to help them decide just where to go with future versions.

Dan Milward announced that they are making 2012 “The Year of the User”, and want to use the feedback from the survey to help determine WP e-Commerce’s roadmap. Dan’s also a brave one, since he said:

If you’ve got a complaint, now’s the time to air it. Sure, we want to hear the good stuff, but those items don’t need fixing.

This video does a nice job of explaining what it seems the team at Theme.ly’s marketplace game plan is. You can read more about their upcoming launch in our post, but essentially they want to make a marketplace that primarily encourages designers and developers to find one another and collaborate.

Red Factory, a business that has sold themes on ThemeForest since 2010, has decided to prepare and launch a theme marketplace called Themely. Themely, they say, will be a new theme marketplace where designers and developers can team up and sell WordPress themes together.

Their idea seems to be that designers will receive payment for theme designs the way writers are in the publishing world, using a royalty model. The process on Themely will begin with an uploaded design, after which developers can adapt the design to WordPress or a number of other content management systems. Designers are then able to chime in and make additional supporting items. The exact workflow and payout structures are still under development with a few developers and designers who are involved at this point.

Currently, according to Red Factory’s Patrick Cohen, there are six designers and seven developers involved and building themes together now to map out the process, and over eighty people have shown an interest in being involved with Themely. Red Factory will continue to sell themes exclusively on ThemeForest while developing and launching their own marketplace. Patrick said they are developing a framework to share with those on their marketplace, and are using sales on ThemeForest to improve it.

They are planning pre-launch of Themely in the early second quarter of 2012, and it will remain an invite only network through the end of the year. If you’re interested be sure to let them know by joining their pre-launch newsletter, and check out their clever pre-launch video for a quick rundown of the idea.

WordPress consultant Bill Erickson has a great collection of code snippets on his site. There are a good deal of Genesis-specific snippets, but also plenty that are useful no matter what theme framework you happen to use.

Automattic Theme Wrangler Ian Stewart linked up his choice WordPress and web design links. I’m happy to see WPCandy on there, of course, but even more so I enjoy the charm of a simple (and short) list of recommended websites. What new sites have you picked up and added to your feeds lately?

I don’t think I’m in a very good position to judge WordPress’ performance in large-scale enterprise situations. My development and client experience isn’t as broad as most, and I spend most of my time on a single (but active) installation of WordPress. So I always find criticisms of WordPress like the one Kevinjohn Gallagher lays out in his post to be particularly interesting reads.

He has comments turned off on his blog, so refer to the discussion on Hacker News and WPTavern, or chat about it below.

BuddyPress 1.5.3 is now available as a fix for those running WordPress 3.3+—which should be all of you, you silly goofs. The list of changes in this version is relatively small. To name a few: an unused forum template was removed from the BuddyPress default theme, deprecated function warnings and PHP notices were cleared, and a toolbar-specific avatar issue was fixed as well. For the full list of changes, see the full 1.5.3 changelog. Glance at that if you need to, but really you should just go get yourself updated.

And in case you’re wondering, the confetti behind the logo above is there to celebrate compatibility. You have to enjoy the small victories, right?

Update: Not long after 1.5.3 was released came 1.5.3.1 that fixed a more serious bug with the way settings are saved. So, go update for that too.

This one happened back in December, but it’s still worth checking out. Milan Petrovic at Dev4Press did a bit of a study to discover the impact of various popular WordPress plugins. He covered 35 plugins in the post, and a few of them didn’t test very well at all.

Automattician and Edit Flow lead developer Daniel Bachhuber announced the launch of version 0.7 of Edit Flow this afternoon. In a few words, Edit Flow is a WordPress plugin that gives more control over the editorial workflow within WordPress. In a few more words, if you’ve ever wanted a more nuanced approach than Draft, Pending Review and Published, this is likely the plugin for you.

This update brings a number of overall improvements to Edit Flow, but particularly highlighted in the announcement is the new modular architecture that allows users to enable or disable individual elements of the plugin for specific custom post types. It’s reminiscent of the Jetpack plugin configuration screen, really. Additionally, Daniel says, new features can now be more easily developed, contributed, and added to Edit Flow as components.